Tweet This

As business owners and marketers, it can sometimes feel like nothing will get the needle to move when it comes to your website's traffic. However, last time I checked, getting discouraged doesn't do anything to drive people to your site. So, instead of hanging your head, you should instead jump into one of these strategies below (or all of them if you really want to see a jump in traffic).

Shutterstock

1. Facebook remarketing

Facebook is a great promotion tool whether you’re in the B2B or B2C industry. But did you know you can set up remarketing audiences in Facebook? By installing a Facebook tracking pixel on your site you can continue to market to customers who have visited your site. This is a great way to create return traffic to your business blog or website. And you can start remarketing to audiences as small as 100 visitors.

2. Facebook email custom audiences

Staying with Facebook, you can also give that email list of yours a second life. Instead of just using it to blast emails to your customers once in a while, you can upload that list into Facebook and capture the social accounts of anyone that has their email address attached to it. This is a HUGE benefit since it will allow you to market to those users on their mobile devices.

3. Twitter remarketing

Twitter remarketing works in almost the exact same way as Facebook remarketing. Simply install the pixel and you can now target your sites visitors on Twitter. The main difference is that Twitter will require a higher minimum audience count before you can start advertising towards them, 500 people to be exact.

4. Twitter custom audiences

Just like Facebook, you can target Twitter users on their mobile devices by uploading their emails into Twitter. However, if you cannot get at least 500 users into your custom audience through an email upload, then you won’t have the required minimum to advertise towards them.

5. Twitter Cards

Twitter Cards is a great tool to drive traffic to your site. They are larger tweets that incorporate images and allow you to have buttons built into the tweet. They allow you to have engaging calls to action, attractive images right in the stream, and you can even give them special functionality like having downloads attached directly to the tweet. Tweets with images get 18 percent more clicks than its text counterparts, so make sure you’re using Twitter Cards.

I just told you how you can use emails for social promotion, but they’re also an amazing tool for driving traffic through a newsletter. Make sure that you have a newsletter opt-in on your website. Great tools for doing this are Drip and Optimonk. It’s free and very easy to set up.

8. Blog, blog, blog

Blogging really does drive traffic. We recently ran an experiment where we increased our blogging from twice per week to over 10 posts per week. The result was a 300 percent increase in traffic in just two months. And this isn’t an unusual occurrence. Another company called Convirza ran a similar experiment with even better results. But, if you’re going to blog, you better do number nine.

9. Promote your blogs on Facebook

You may have heard that Facebook has cut back on their organic reach. This means that almost no one will see your social media posts on Facebook. Instead, you need to put a little bit of budget behind them. A good strategy is to have a campaign constantly running that is featuring your blog posts and target that campaign towards your custom audience and remarketing audience as described above.

10. Optimize your site for SEO

Trying to manipulate the search-engine rankings is a losing proposition at this point. Instead, what you should be concerned with is making your site look as good as possible for the search engine robots that will be crawling your website. Software like SEMrush or ahrefs.com can give you a complete SEO audit and show you what you should fix. Spending time on your site’s SEO optimization is always time well spent.

11. Exchange blog posts with other sites

Syndicating your blog on other sites is a great way to drive new audiences to your site. A great way to do this is to search for blogs that are in a similar industry as you and that are in a similar situation in terms of size and audience. Then, you reach out to their editor or site administrator and ask if they’d like to swap blog articles and you each take turns featuring each other’s blogs and linking back to the site. Special measures should be taken to avoid duplicate content, but this is a great way to drive new customers to your site.

12. Automate your emails

Shockingly, marketing automation has only been adopted by about 10 percent of all businesses. So, why aren’t you using marketing automation? Do you really want to be like those other 90% of companies that just don't get it? It may have been that the costs were too prohibitive or that it seemed too daunting, but there’s help with that. There are new lower cost marketing automation platforms like Autopilot and Hatchbuck that are great for small businesses. But if you still have your heart set on HubSpot or a similar product, then look for a certified partner, like my firm or others like us, that can help onboard you and can even waive the kickoff fees that can cost several thousand dollars.

Now that you have your software set up, you need to ensure you have email campaigns set up for everything. There should be an automated email campaign when someone fills out a form, downloads some content or signs up for the newsletter.

Contributing to other websites is a great way to drive traffic to your site. I myself write for about a dozen major media site, and while it may not result in immediate customers, the benefits are definitely felt throughout the organization. And our referral traffic from these sites is a huge boon.

To become a contributor you need to start small and work your way up. There were times that I was writing articles that I knew no one was going to read. I wasn't contributing to anywhere of note. But I needed to keep persevering and develop a track record that editors would take seriously. So start small and never give up.

Also, you need to hone your craft when it comes to writing. To do this you need to be writing every single day. The more you write, the better you’ll be come and the better your chances will be at becoming a contributor.

14. Create a quiz

Quizzes are fun pieces of content that work really well at driving engagement with your visitors. Plus, they’re a cinch to promote on social media using the techniques presented earlier in this article. Sites like Quzzr allow you to create free quizzes to then post on your blog and drive traffic to your site.

15. Host a webinar or webcast

Regardless of your industry, I can guarantee there’s a topic you have enough expertise on that your customers would come to listen to you speak. The trick is to identify this topic and then to create a fun and engaging presentation. Once you've chosen the subject and have a solid slide deck, promote it on social media, in your newsletter, and ask your network to spread the word. You may not get a lot of people to attend, but you can then make the webinar on-demand and promote it as a download for months to come.

16. Create a podcast

If you’re worried you can’t present to a live audience or develop the right message, then instead consider a podcast. Podcasts are great ways of distributing your expertise and are a surefire way of driving traffic to your site -- but you need to be consistent and promote it.

When you first start off, it will seem like you’re talking into a black hole and no one is listening to you. But if you stay persistent and promote your podcast on social media, your audience will grow and your future episodes will gain more and more listeners.

There are usually dozens of partnership opportunities for any business out there. The trick is to find those partners and establish a working relationship. To give an example of this, we signed up as a partner for Unbounce. They’re a landing page creation software that helps companies optimize their marketing campaigns. It was free to sign up as a partner and they then featured us in their partner section and allowed us to do a little write up on our firm. Before you knew it we were getting leads from their site and it’s been a great source of traffic for us.